Learn about the Top 20 Finalist Teams in the 2012 Microsoft Imagine Cup

Top 20 Finalist Teams in the 2012 Microsoft Imagine Cup provide a brief description on their idea. Support your favourite team at the Microsoft Imagine Cup Finals on the 30th of April from 7-9pm – Save the Date!

InTspiration -AUT

Our project is to create some software to aid in the evaluation of land for potential sustainability. Our hope is to create a bit of software that, given certain data readily available on the internet, would be able to help realise energy potential with a certain area of land.

Team United - AUT

Project Silver Bullet aims to reduce unemployment in developing countries by creating accessibility to the job market for the impoverished and providing support throughout the process of securing a job and holding onto it. Project Silver Bullet aims to indirectly reduce poverty by tackling unemployment through streamlining current governmental and loan or microcredit initiatives using a single software product. It also aims to support and foster a sense of empowerment among employment hunters to ensure that the work cycle is sustainable and eventually evolves into a self driven machine. We are also working on a unique algorithm that predicts if a person would be successful in any chosen business.

Team YouMark - AUT

Team YouMark seek to revolutionize the current education system by bringing the classroom experience into the home of millions, focusing on self paced learning. The tools being developed by Team YouMark will enable creation off next generation interactive content with teacher collaboration.

Mobile Eye - AUT

Visual impairment is a significant health problem across the globe. Every 5 seconds one person in the world goes blind. Although 80% of visual impairment is preventable, for the 45 million blind people across the globe, prevention is no longer the cure . New Zealand is no stranger to this growing health issue. The number of blind people in New Zealand is projected to grow from 12,000 today, to as much as 18,000 in 2020. Vision loss robs people of their well-being and presents a significant economic cost. In taking these factors into consideration, team Iris has developed a software designed to provide assistance to blind New Zealanders. In recognizing the extensive efforts tailored at the prevention of blindness by leading organisations like the World Health Organisation (WHO) and International Agency for the Prevention of Blindnes (IAPD), team Iris made the decision to focus our attention on the wellbeing of those who are already blind. The application MobileEye is designed to provide the user with an added richness of information. It can take on a multitude of uses simply based on the needs of the user. It is the team’s intention that this technology will assist the individual in the areas of navigation, shopping and even simple day to day activities that can benefit from a greater awareness of surroundings. The concept is simple – take a photo of your surroundings and hear your phone describe it to you. The technology however is a little more extensive.

Team MATx – Lincoln Uni

Using Microsoft Kinect technology by medical centers/physiotherapist or individuals for aid in post-stroke rehabilitation can help save more lives and drastically help drive down the rate of deaths each year by keeping people more fit and making them active and feel lively. This will have benefits such as reduction of rehab session cost, educational benefits, better privacy, flexibility, less likely extra injuries due to transportation, live chat access to medical assistant anytime, monitor of patient progress, interesting and much more fun than the normal boring sessions. And it could be used for other purposes as well such as networking among people suffering from stroke sharing their experiences, ideas, etc.

Dawn Phenomena - Unitec

We are creating an educational diabetes system that is targeted at children aged 7-14(and those young at heart), in particular, those that have type 1 or 2 diabetes. The system will be used to educate children, particularly newly diagnosed children, about all things related to the diabetes condition and how one can go about living a long and fruitful life with the condition. All the components of our solution will be based on exploiting interactive features of computer games to deliver education knowledge through immersive and situational learning. The system consists of three major components, a video game, a mobile phone application and a web application. All of which will be made available on a website we will be creating.

Decarbonators - Unitec

We are developing a creative technology solution that addresses a real-world challenge that will help alleviate climate change and pollution problems caused by carbon emission due to the apathetic attitude displayed by all levels of society from individuals to giant corporations. CFI can be installed on an individual’s mobile phone with a pre-set profiles to choose from, enables every individual to get an estimate of their Carbon Footprint while they commute to uni, work etc by different means of transport. We provide each user with an up-to-date CF as an indicator on their screen or will be running in the background. Our system will award users with DeCarbon Points eg: earn more snapper points every X times they make use of a public transport instead of driving or while they do carpooling etc. DeCarbon points can be used to claim discounts on food or at any other commercial organizations that are tied up with CFI. Once they use up their DeCarbon points their account will be debited with the points they used up and will have to earn more as they go.

BackUp – UOA

Back pain affects at least 80% of all people at some point in their lives and is easily preventable with good posture. However, a sedentary lifestyle coupled with increasing computer use for work and entertainment and little motivation to maintain posture means that this problem can become severely debilitating for chronic sufferers. National back pain payout costs are over $500 million p.a. Our idea is a simple, lightweight vest/singlet to be worn by all-aged members of the population. This senses the spine's alignment in 3D and relays this to a smartphone, which then signals an alert if poor posture is maintained for some time. This is also used to update pain specialists' medical records electronically and as a research tool to give insight into common postural problems across particular subsets of the population.

Team Connect – UOA

Christchurch earthquake, Japan tsunami, Thailand flooding. 2011 was known as the year of disasters – what do they have in common? Immediate communication failure. If you’re in a disaster zone, the first thing you’ll want to do is connect with loved ones; and that goes for everyone else around you. High traffic causes massive congestion to any remaining cell towers and telcos often struggle to keep communication up and running for days, or even weeks. As the first 72 hours are crucial, any downtime can be catastrophic. We are developing a communication system that, unlike traditional solutions, will respond immediately in the critical hours following a disaster. We are Team Connect, and our solution will keep you connected to loved ones when you need them the most.

Get Lost – UOA

Our 'find me' smartphone application communicates with a wireless transmitter that can be worn by a child to allow parents to monitor where they are at all times. This application makes it easy for parents to find lost children and can be also used as a tool to prevent loosing children.

Silver Pass – UOA

Our idea is a solution to deal with a wide spread issue that is common at primary school level. Traditionally in schools the only mechanisms in place for information transfer are the report cards and infrequent parent-teacher interviews. For a relationship as important as the one between student, parent and teacher, this is simply insufficient, and good education is being compromised. Our solution replaces the traditional report with much more frequent, shorter updates throughout the year, both keeping parents involved and spreading out teacher workload. This would be done through a cloud based computer system that also facilitates parental discussion and learning suggestions. We hope this will improve the quality of both education and life of primary school children.

Team 2RTF – UOA

Our idea is concerned with the optimisation of aid distribution in disaster stricken areas. Our program is supplied with information on aid distribution, supplies, infrastructure and population density levels and will compute where aid needs to be and where it isn’t needed. In addition, it can also be used to deploy aid on a case by case basis.

Aura – UOA

Team Aura is set to revolutionize the diagnosis of Obstructive Sleep Apnea. OSA affects 1.2 billion people worldwide, and an Aura module consists of an advanced algorithm that detects breathing patterns of a patient through innovative monitoring technology. This information can then be easily accessed by medical professionals and patients alike through the Microsoft Azure Cloud Platform, allowing the improved efficient diagnosis of OSA .

Dunyati – UOA

We are dedicated to getting farmers in third world countries a fair price for their coffee. Our idea utilizes cheap technology that is both effective and easily deployed. We aim to partner with fair-trade as well as a few other NPO's and utilize pre-built infrastructure to help us attain our goals. Phase two of our plan is to setup micro-lending to african farmers that will be paid back once they harvest their crops, ensuring a higher quality crop and a higher quality of life for the farmers.

Thought-Wired – UOA

Thought-Wired NOUS is an integrated solution designed to restore abilities to those who lack them. Its primary function is to empower individuals with severe physical disabilities in communication and interaction capacities. It allows people, who are unable to speak, to communicate with anybody using the mind alone. Using NOUS individuals with disabilities can communicate with their family and friends offline in their place of residence or anywhere else as well as online over the Internet. Besides communication NOUS opens unlimited possibilities for our users via extensible platform. Additional capabilities can be anything from controlling simple devices at home to education, mobility and entertainment applications.

Team Zooks – Otago Uni

Charities do great things, but the sad fact is the majority of these need to raise funds to allow them to carry on doing what they do. ‘Change for Charity’ is service that provides revenue gathering for charities that distributes collected donations and allows acharities to provide feedback to users where their donations are spent. The way the revenue is collected is by a piece of software that is installed on store payment systems that with the users agreement rounds their purchase up to the nearest 10cents and then donates the rounding to a charity. Particular charities could be chosen depending on the individual choices or charities could apply to be displayed for a certain period and proceeds gathered from transactions would be donated to them. Feed back to contributors could be sent back to them to their mobiles letting them know what difference their contribution has provided.

Team Doctor Pepper – Otago Uni

Originally our idea was focused on testing water in New Zealand conditions to see if it had been polluted. After seeing the aid agencies presentations and consulting with our mentors we have changed our idea to being a tool for aid agencies to allocate resources to provide quality water all over the world where it is most needed. We will do this by creating a phone app which allows agencies to input information about water quality and ask for resources at their current location. This Information will be stored in a database and accessible by a website.

Vcom – VUOW

Replacing the traditional way of communication between the UNICEF authorities and the victims, by a translator who translates the vocal English to the respective local language. The project will aim on a hand held device for translating language verbally.

Cloud Solutions – VUOW

Tsunami's are one of the world's biggest natural disasters and killers and one that cannot be averted. Over the last few years prediction systems have been built to predict tsunamis but due to lack of processing power they have been unable to really make a difference. It takes about 5 to 7 minutes to get a prediction of a tsunami's details like direction, height, etc. This time can be reduced to staggering 20 to 30 seconds which could save thousands of lives. This can be achieved by offloading this compute intensive workload to the Windows Azure Cloud. By using the GreenButton SDK and Windows Azure Cloud Technology we can enable this tusnami prediction software to use the benifits of the cloud and put the cloud to a great use which can save lives.